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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Foreword by Professor Rob Coe Through a set of in-depth case studies, This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teachers (and what we can learn from them) by John Tomsett dissects the complex and beautiful art of classroom teaching. Covering a range of school types, social contexts, pupil ages and subjects, it brings to life how nine outstanding primary teachers engage, inspire, nurture and motivate their pupils. Each detailed vignette, based on observing the teachers teach, and discussions with them, their colleagues and pupils, brings the qualities of truly great teachers to life. Each teacher is unique in the way they teach and in how they talk about teaching. But they also have some common behaviours and attitudes that make them truly great, which John draws together, summarising what we can learn from their unbridled enthusiasm, skill and dedication to giving their pupils the very best foundation for a bright future. Essential reading for all primary school teachers, school leaders, teacher trainers and education researchers.
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Praise for Truly Great Primary Teachers
I’m a simple soul and I’m always looking for ways to bring abstract ideas like ‘quality first teaching’ to life. Terms like these are talked about a lot; rarely are they exemplified. What John has done in Truly Great Primary Teachers is to identify and profile the work of individual teachers to help me to get some purchase on QFT. As I read these accounts of teachers who are having a profound impact on their pupils both academically and personally, I realised I can learn from each of them: the way they develop rapport with their classes, the way they pitch the lessons high, the way they include every child. And, above all, the delight they take in weaving it all together. This is such a heart-warming, unique lens on the profession. We can all take something from these wonderful profiles of brilliant professionals.
Mary Myatt, educational consultant
Truly Great Primary Teachers explores the multifaceted nature of effective teaching and considers how it can be measured. The book highlights how truly great teachers are committed to reflective practice and continuous learning, creating environments where pupils thrive academically and socially. The influence of these highly effective practitioners extends beyond measurable test scores; they cultivate a genuine love for learning, as well as confidence, resilience, intrinsic drive and curiosity in their pupils – all of which are harder to quantify, but vitally important. Through first-hand examples, John illustrates how high-quality pedagogy, coupled with a focus on personal growth, empowers pupils to grasp complex concepts that contribute to them making great progress in their learning at levels that they, themselves, hardly thought possible.
Em Ward, Head Teacher, Ravensthorpe Primary School, Peterborough
In Truly Great Primary Teachers, John Tomsett captures the human element of what makes great teachers ‘truly great’. Through detailed profiles and personal anecdotes, we are provided with a fascinating look at their unique approaches to teaching and learning, their commitment to continuous improvement and, most importantly, what it is like to be a pupil in their classroom. We experience the dedication and passion of these inspiring individuals who make such a difference to the communities they are part of and can fully appreciate the thought processes behind the successes they achieve with their children. B
Dan Oakes, Head Teacher, St Bartholomew’s Primary School
This is a book for everybody interested in improving the lived experience of pupils in the classroom. From system leaders to those just stepping out into the early stages of their career, Truly Great Primary Teachers tells the story of how teachers change lives. Pupils from low-income backgrounds are typically more sensitive to the quality of education they experience. In the classroom, for me, this is about the triumvirate of strong subject knowledge, expert pedagogy and the understanding of childhood coupled with the ability to build strong relationships with and between pupils. It is the building and securing of relationships with pupils, who may be experiencing a range of academic and social challenges, all within the exposed environment of the classroom, that makes teachers truly special. This book brings to life how teachers have a profound impact on learners and their colleagues. It tells a story of what makes a truly great teacher.
Marc Rowland, adviser for improving outcomes for disadvantaged learners for the Unity Schools Partnership
This is a must-read for all educators. Truly Great Primary Teachers drives home the importance of the purposeful relationships that sit at the heart of great teaching. It also celebrates the individual identity that each teacher brings to the classroom. John has beautifully told each teacher’s story, creating a window into their world, whilst connecting the reader to the teacher’s colleagues and pupils in the interwoven interviews. Rarely does a book share the raw realities of day-to-day teaching, whilst detailing the personal motivations that drive teachers to teach. It is both a privilege and a joy to read something that reminds us all why teaching is such a great profession and how truly great teachers make a difference to young people’s lives by making their classrooms places where learning is irresistible.
Andrew Rhodes, Primary PGCE Lecturer and Professional Tutor, University of Manchester, Director of Redefining Education Ltd
CD
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This book is dedicated to Mary Myatt, who has taught me more about the school curriculum these past few years than she would ever know!F
Foreword by Professor Rob Coe1
I suspect this book, and its accompanying title This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them), may have come into being partly because of a misunderstanding, a failure of communication. As John describes in the introduction, it arose from a presentation Raj Chande and I gave about our National Institute of Teaching project to try to estimate value-added scores for individual teachers (anonymised) in order to learn more about what great teaching is and how it develops. John was in the audience and something about the idea of reducing the rich complexity of teaching to a single number seemed to grate with him – perhaps not unreasonably. He asked a question that I interpreted as challenging, and I am sorry to say I responded a bit confrontationally, trying to put him down and close down the challenge. As a result, I missed the opportunity to find common ground, to understand his concerns and to explain why what we were trying to do was not quite what he thought. My bad. But from that bad, came a brilliant thing: a pair of books.
This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teachers (and what we can learn from them), alongside its accompanying title This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them), is a wonderful celebration of the complex and beautiful art of classroom teaching. It brings to life the ways great teachers coordinate great learning in classrooms with a set of vivid case studies. The chosen examples cover a range of school types, social contexts, pupil ages and subjects. Each teacher is unique in the way they teach, and in how they talk about teaching; each has found their own way; each is brought to technicolour life in John’s vignette. But they also have some common characteristics and behaviours, as John draws together, summarising what we can learn from them in the final chapter.
iiI first started thinking in a systematic way about what great teachers do when writing the report What Makes Great Teaching? in 2014.2 The Sutton Trust and Gates Foundation had co-organised a conference in Washington DC at which they wanted to bring together some of the best teachers and school leaders from around the world. Lee Elliot Major had asked me to lead on creating the report that became What Makes Great Teaching? and to present it at the conference. I first knew John as one of the early edu-bloggers and through Twitter, and by that point was working with him directly as part of an Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)-funded project to evaluate the impact of training school research leads to interpret and apply research evidence, led by Huntington School where he was the head teacher (Research leads Improving Students’ Education – RISE).3 I think I nominated John to be invited to Washington as part of a small group of outstanding school leaders from England. My memory is that the report and its messages had a somewhat luke-warm reception in Washington. Although our hand-picked delegates from England liked it, the majority of teachers there were from the USA and other places where the role of research evidence in teaching was not yet established. What Makes Great Teaching? went on to become the Sutton Trust’s most downloaded research report, by some margin, and has since featured in the recommended reading for all trainee teachers in England through the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework.4
In the report we defined effective teaching by its impact on valued student outcomes, acknowledging that a range of different outcomes could be valued (for example, academic attainment in examinations, future education and career trajectories, along with impacts on students’ attendance, behaviours and attitudes). We also considered, in iiisome detail, other approaches to evaluating the quality of teaching, including: classroom observations, by peers, principals or external evaluators; student ratings surveys; principal (or head teacher) judgement; teacher self-reports; analysis of classroom artefacts and teacher portfolios. We presented the evidence about the convergence of these different approaches and concluded that ‘their predictive power is usually not high’. To illustrate the strength of the relationships typically found in the best research studies, we gave a hypothetical example: ‘if we were to use classroom observation ratings to identify teachers as “above” or “below” average in their impact on student learning we would get it right about 60% of the time, compared with the 50% we would get by just tossing a coin. It is better than chance, but not by much.’
Part of the reason classroom observation correlates only weakly with student progress measures is that observing classrooms is a lot harder than it seems. Most teachers and school leaders have a clear idea what great teaching looks like. When they watch a lesson, they have a strong sense that they can interpret what they see and hear, and that they can judge how good it is. In my experience, it is very hard to convince them that their judgements may not be as accurate as they intuitively feel. And yet, these judgements are mostly wrong.5
Among the reasons why it is so hard to judge effectiveness from observation is that many of the things that make a difference to students’ learning are not visible, and even those that are may not be on display in any particular lesson. This creates a challenge for any researcher who wants to develop an evidence-based protocol for lesson observation and it applies to all the existing instruments (some of which we reviewed in What Makes Great Teaching?). But for teachers and school leaders, who are not trained and accredited in using a validated protocol and rely on their intuitive judgements, there is a further reason: different teachers do not completely agree about what great teaching is. As we said in the report, ‘It might seem obvious that this is ivalready well known: we surely know what great teaching looks like … In fact, there is some evidence that an understanding of what constitutes effective pedagogy – the method and practice of teaching – may not be so widely shared, and even where it is widely shared it may not actually be right.’ A small section of the report pointed out some examples of ‘popular teaching practices not supported by research evidence’ to illustrate that describing great teaching is not just common sense. But the press release led with ‘many common practices can be harmful to learning and have no grounding in research’6 and I recall doing multiple radio and television interviews explaining the dangers of ‘lavish praise for students’.
All of this is perhaps a slightly long-winded way of saying that identifying great teachers is tricky and trying to describe what they do that makes them great even more so. Many excellent researchers over the last 50 or more years have tried to do both, and yet our knowledge remains partial and uncertain. It is one of those questions about which practitioners will mostly feel frustration that researchers are making it so complicated. Surely, we know what great teaching is and is it really that hard to describe it? To which researchers may reply that, certainly, it is not hard to do it badly, but doing it well is very hard indeed.
What Makes Great Teaching? reviewed and quality-assured a wide range of research evidence about the components of teaching quality and presented an outline framework to summarise it. When I started working for Evidence Based Education in 2019, we thought it would be useful to update the review. But we soon realised that a summary of research findings about effective teaching, however authoritative and accessible, is not enough to help teachers to do more of it, more faithfully, more sustainably, more effectively and at greater scale. For that, we needed a more diverse set of tools to support a coherent approach to professional development, hence the Great Teaching Toolkit. vNevertheless, the foundation of that Toolkit is an updated Evidence Review.
The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review7 sets out a model for great teaching, based on the best currently available evidence. The highest-level summary clarifies that great teachers do four fundamental things:
1 Understand the content they are teaching and how it is learnt
2 Create a supportive environment for learning
3 Manage the classroom to maximise opportunity to learn
4 Present content, activities and interactions that activate their students’ thinking
Each of these four broad dimensions is then split into a total of 17 elements:
1 Understanding the content
1.1. Deep and fluent content knowledge
1.2. Curriculum knowledge: sequencing
1.3. Knowledge of tasks, assessments and multiple explanations
1.4. Knowledge of student thinking: misconceptions
2 Creating a supportive environment
2.1. Relationships with students and cultural sensitivity
2.2. Student–student relationships and climate
2.3. Promoting learner motivation
2.4. High expectations, challenge and trust
3 Maximising the opportunity to learn
3.1. Managing time and resources to maximise productivity vi
3.2. Clear and consistent rules, expectations and consequences
3.3. Preventing and responding to disruption and showing awareness
4 Activating hard thinking
4.1. Structuring: matching tasks, scaffolding and signalling objectives
4.2. Explaining: presenting and connecting ideas and modelling examples
4.3. Questioning: promoting hard thinking and assessing
4.4. Interacting: giving, receiving and responding to feedback
4.5. Embedding: practising, reinforcing and spacing learning
4.6. Activating: building independence and supporting metacognition
Of course, these are just headlines, very abbreviated descriptions of complex practices that are, at best, inadequately captured in words. To be well-defined, in addition we need exemplification (rich and varied examples and non-examples) and operationalisation (clear processes for assessing whether an example represents the target practice). A big challenge with descriptors is that we can think we mean the same things by the same words when we actually have quite different understandings in practice, especially when the descriptors are quite abstract and general, as they inevitably must be.
The purpose of sharing this framework here is twofold. The first is to note that there is a lot of overlap between what the evidence suggests are the practices most associated with effective teaching and the practices described in the following chapters. John summarises ten behaviours of truly great teachers in the last chapter and I would say they are all represented in the model, and that other features of their teaching, described in the individual chapters, are also represented. Overall, I would say we are in pretty close agreement about what great teachers do. vii
The second reason is that each detailed vignette, based on an observation of one lesson and discussions with the teacher, their colleagues and pupils, brings these characteristics to life in a way no general framework can. We are left with a much richer picture of not just what these teachers do, but why: the choices and adaptations they make and the principles that guide them. In short, we need both: a generic, research-grounded framework, and specific, detail-rich descriptions of real examples.
So, does a single, numerical value capture everything that is worth knowing about great teaching? Of course not; no one has ever claimed it could or should. This might be an example of the perfectionist fallacy, that because something is not perfect it must be useless. Of course, most things are in-between. The key is to understand what uses and interpretations are valid.
In the assessment, measurement and psychometric tradition in which I was trained as a researcher, validity is not seen as a property of a particular score or measure. Instead, validity applies to specific uses and interpretations of that measure. Before we can judge whether it is appropriate to use assessment data (from a variety of commercial, bought-in assessments, school-made assessments, and national assessments and examinations) to estimate the impact of a teacher on pupils’ learning, we need to know the purpose: what will it be used for and what caveats are attached to its interpretation?
In the presentation that provoked John to put down a marker for truly great teaching, we were perhaps not as clear about this as we could have been. In our project, teacher value-added scores will be used for research purposes only, with fully anonymised data. We have a clear agreement with the teachers, schools and trusts who have provided the data that no consequences (good or bad) can be linked with these value-added scores. Moreover, the analysis we have done so far makes it clear that, even if people wanted to use the scores for things like selection, reward or performance management, scores for individual teachers are mostly not really accurate enough to support those uses. Scores are probably accurate enough for us to find large-scale statistical viiipatterns, which is what we have set up the project to do. We want to learn more, in a systematic and rigorous way, about what great teachers (i.e. those who help their students to learn more) do, know and believe and about how they became great, and how we can help all teachers to be more like them.
The teachers whose work is celebrated in the chapters of this book also contribute to the wider project. Not only do they spend their days doing the most inspiring, challenging and important job in the world, educating the next generation, but by sharing their practice with us in these pages, they illuminate the world of truly great teachers. Most of them seem to think that they are nothing special, that they just do their job and that many others do the same. While the last part of this may be true – there are many more truly great teachers who could have been featured – the first part is not: they are truly special, awe-inspiring individuals, and we all have a lot to learn from them.
Rob Coe
1 It is worth noting that the introduction to the primary version of this book is identical to the introduction to the secondary version.
2 R. Coe, C. Aloisi, S. Higgins and L. Elliot Major, What Makes Great Teaching? Review of the Underpinning Research (London: Sutton Trust, 2014). Available at: https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/What-Makes-Great-Teaching-REPORT.pdf.
3 See: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/the-rise-project-evidence-informed-school-improvement.
4 Department for Education, Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (January 2024). Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/661d24ac08c3be25cfbd3e61/Initial_Teacher_Training_and_Early_Career_Framework.pdf.
5 See, for example, R. Coe, Classroom observation: it’s harder than you think, CambridgeInsight [blog] (9 January 2014). Available at: https://www.cem.org/blog/classroom-observation.
6 Sutton Trust, Many popular teaching practices are ineffective, warns new Sutton Trust report [press release] (30 October 2014). Available at: https://www.suttontrust.com/news-opinion/all-news-opinion/many-popular-teaching-practices-are-ineffective-warns-new-sutton-trust-report/.
7 R. Coe, C. J. Rauch, S. Kime and D. Singleton, The Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review (Sunderland: Evidence Based Education, 2020). Available at: https://evidencebased.education/great-teaching-toolkit-evidence-review/.
Preface
In order to write the teacher profiles that comprise this book, I visited each teacher’s school during the Autumn term 2024. The schedule of visits was completely random, but what I learnt about these truly great teachers built over time. Consequently, I have ordered the profiles chronologically. They can be read one-by-one as individual narratives, or from beginning to end to give a more holistic sense of how my understanding of the professional behaviours common to these teachers grew.
All the teachers featured here work in primary schools, except for Mary Cawley, who is a special school teacher. Even though her school’s pupils are of secondary age, the school is not designated a phase of education. She features here, as well as in this book’s sister publication, This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them) because what we can learn from Mary’s work is, I would suggest, applicable to all teachers in any setting. x
Acknowledgements
In my experience, teachers are naturally modest. They usually focus upon what they feel they are getting wrong in the classroom, rather than what they are doing right. Consequently, persuading a teacher to feature in a book that celebrates how well they teach is difficult. Sincere thanks goes, then, to the teachers whose stories I tell here – Maddie Jacques, Josh Pike, Nicola Curran, Faariah Jamil, Dean Salisbury, Helen Digger, Molly Medhurst, Mary Cawley and Megan Bull – for taking a metaphorical deep breath and agreeing to let me into their working lives, to see what they do so well. Inevitably, my words are an inadequate representation of their truly great teaching.
Over the years, Professor Rob Coe’s impact upon my thinking has been immense. As the narrative of this book reveals, our challenging conversation about how best to judge teacher effectiveness at the researchED national conference in September 2024 spawned this book and its accompanying title, This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them). Without Rob, neither book would have been written. For him, then, to agree to write the books’ foreword reflects huge generosity of spirit on his part. I cannot thank Rob enough.
I could not have written these books without the cooperation of the teachers’ head teachers, colleagues and pupils. It has been fun zipping about the country, visiting such a range of diverse schools in such a short time. I felt welcome everywhere I’ve been, for which I am very grateful and my conversations with the pupils will, especially, stay with me for a long time.
It is good to be back at Crown House again, a decade after my first book with them. I am keen to thank publicly David Bowman and his colleagues for having faith in me and accepting my pitch for this project. His team have worked tirelessly with me to prepare these books for publication, particularly Beverley Randell. xii
Finally, I must thank my wife Louise for tolerating all those evenings I was unavoidably absent, either holed up in a hotel in a far-flung corner of these Isles, or next door in my office tapping away on my laptop.
Contents
xv
‘This job of teaching is so hard that one lifetime isn’t enough to master it.’
Dylan Wiliam1
xvi
1 Speaking at The Schools Network (then known as the SSAT) National Conference 2010.
Introduction
The genesis of this book, and its accompanying title (This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers), is rooted in a conversation with Professor Rob Coe. At the national researchED conference in September 2024, I had listened to Rob and his colleague, Dr Raj Chande, talk about their quest to establish a single value-added progress score for a teacher’s pupils, to determine that teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom.
What Rob and Raj want to do is find a reliable, easily accessible metric to assess teacher quality. In 2014 I went to Washington DC with Rob and several others, including luminaries like Professor Lee Elliot Major, to launch the Sutton Trust’s publication, What Makes Great Teaching?, in which Rob et al. defined ‘effective teaching as that which leads to improved pupil achievement using outcomes that matter to their future success.’1 It’s logical, in the light of that sensible definition, to choose one pupil value-added progress score if you are searching for a single metric.
I first met Rob over a decade ago when Alex Quigley, Stuart Kime and I ran a project for the Education Endowment Foundation.2 We spent several afternoons in my office discussing how to set up the project. Rob made my head hurt. He genuinely transformed my professional outlook. He just kept asking the question, ‘How do you know?’ And most times, I couldn’t answer him.
When we were chatting about his single value-added progress score project, I said to Rob that I thought there were other things they might do to determine how to measure teacher quality, rather than pursue a 2single, numeric pupil progress data point. Rob conceded that I might have a point, but then he asked me, ‘Well, what should we be doing?’
I said that I would think about it. And I have. A lot.
My counter to Rob and Raj’s argument is that being a truly great teacher goes way beyond value-added scores. The characteristics of truly great teachers will, in my experience, result in their pupils making great academic progress. But the impact a truly great teacher can make upon their pupils’ lives is surely measured in myriad ways, beyond the single metric Rob and Raj want to establish.
As you may already have realised, dear reader, the single metric Rob and Raj are pursuing sticks in my craw. Sammy Wright’s remarkable book, Exam Nation, asks, amongst many things, how our education system became so obsessed with the single output measure of pupils’ academic progress.3 Don’t get me wrong, examination success gives young people a choice about how they live their lives; that said, without wanting to provoke cries of ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, surely there are other measures of success which matter just as much, but in different ways. If we pursue a single value-added measure as the only outcome of education that really matters, then we have, perhaps, missed the point. As Bernard Andrews wrote in his provocative essay, ‘How “efficiency” derailed education’, ‘if school encourages and enables students to be brave, kind, wise and so on, and if it does so with prudence, then it is time and money well spent.’4
If Rob and Raj did one thing, they got me thinking … about all the colleagues I worked with over 33 years, and about the hundreds of teachers I have had the privilege of watching teach as a peripatetic consultant since stepping down from headship. In answer to Rob’s question, ‘Well, what should we be doing?’ I have concluded that we should try to ascertain what it is that truly great teachers do that makes 3them truly great. Consequently, I identified 19 teachers – eight primary and ten secondary colleagues, and a special school colleague – who I think could be described as truly great teachers and constructed a profile for each one of them. In the following pages you will find profiles of the eight primary teachers. The secondary teachers’ profiles can be found in the sister book, This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them). I have included our special school colleague in both books, as the learning from her profile is educative irrespective of phase, making it nine teacher profiles altogether in this book.
When it comes to pupils’ attainment and progress, I too want pupils in the classes of truly great teachers to make brilliant progress and attain amazing examination grades. But any data on pupils’ progress needs triangulating with other evidence. Consequently, to assure you that they are truly great, each teacher profile contains the following elements:
A conversation with their head teacher/principal (if possible)Lesson observation reflectionsInterviews with pupilsAn interview with meTestimonials from colleagues, pupils and parentsA summary of the traits that make them exceptionalPupil progress and attainment dataHaving been involved in education, in one guise or another, for 54 of my 60 years on earth, I knew I couldn’t include all the tremendous teachers I’ve known in that time. I would have featured more, but even nine is probably too many. So, my sincere apologies to all those truly great teachers I could have included but didn’t, because there just weren’t enough pages to go round.
It wasn’t so hard finding nine truly great teachers – there are thousands of them in our country’s classrooms. The challenge was to persuade 4them to let me include them in the book. Truly great teachers are a modest lot. They took some convincing to take part. And when a school leader asked me what I meant by a ‘truly great teacher’, I replied: Nothing scientific … a teacher who you think is truly great, who really knows their stuff, who teaches great lessons, day-in, day-out, whose pupils get great outcomes and who is just consistently great in every sense. Consequently, the teachers featured in this book are not intended to be representative of anything. They are merely a small group of truly great teachers I happen to know or who have been recommended to me by people I know and trust. In the words of Sir David Carter, they teach ‘consistently good lessons that are well planned and progress sequentially from the previous lesson.’5 And that’s it.
In the final chapter of this book, I identify the professional behaviours common to the teachers I have featured. I contextualise my conclusions within research findings from Barak Rosenshine.6
Now, I am acutely aware of the problem with labelling anyone a truly great teacher. No teacher is flawless. Any teacher can teach poorly, simply because the essential raw materials of a lesson are flesh and blood, not wood and steel. In every lesson there are literally hundreds of variables, each one of which can make any teacher look anything but truly great. As Chris Husbands so elegantly argues, ‘it’s teaching, not teachers, which matters.’7
That said, if I had focused upon teaching rather than teachers in the book’s title, it would have not represented the content of the book, nor what motivated me to write it. The book is about teachers, and how those teachers teach in a way that means their pupils learn. If the book was entitled, ‘This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teaching’, it would have suggested that it’s about me and what I might think about 5primary teaching, when the book is about truly great primary teachers and, crucially, what we can learn from them.
Beyond that important semantic nuance, I wanted to stress the humanity of the teaching and learning process. Focusing upon the teachers and what they actually do in the classroom in detail, underlined how teaching and learning is such a messy, joyful, human process. And I wanted, ultimately, to celebrate some of the best teachers I know, as I near the end of my professional career and hand the baton on to the truly great colleagues featured here.
I am both delighted and grateful that Professor Rob Coe agreed to write the foreword to this book. He provides a brilliant, forensic counterpoint to my qualitative approach. It may be that any teacher whose pupils make extraordinary progress, only make that progress because that teacher exhibits the professional behaviours shared by the nine truly great teachers featured here. The behaviours and the progress data are, perhaps, just two sides of the same coin.
Finally, the conversations that form the heart of this book have been genuinely inspiring. Gadamer said that, ‘No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation … a conversation has a spirit of its own, and the language in which it is conducted has a truth of its own so that it allows something to “emerge”which henceforth exists.’8 We live in a world of binary intransigence. So, in the spirit of collaboration, I hope that the conversations you’ll find in the following pages spark limitless discussions in schools across the country, and from those discussions clarity and truth emerge as we all work to provide our young people with the richest classroom experiences imaginable.
6
1 R. Coe, C. Aloisi, S. Higgins and L. Elliot Major, What Makes Great Teaching? Review of the Underpinning Research (London: Sutton Trust, 2014). Available at: https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/What-Makes-Great-Teaching-REPORT.pdf.
2 See: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/the-rise-project-evidence-informed-school-improvement.
3 S. Wright, Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School (London: Vintage Publishing, 2024).
4 B. Andrews, How ‘efficiency’ derailed education, TES (25 February 2025). Available at: https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/how-efficiency-derailed-education.
5 In a private conversation with the author.
6 B. Rosenshine, Teaching Behaviours and Student Achievement, no. 1 (IEA studies) (Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research, 1 November 1971).
7 C. Husbands, Great teachers or great teaching? Why McKinsey got it wrong, IOE blog (10 October 2013). Available at: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2013/10/10/great-teachers-or-great-teaching-why-mckinsey-got-it-wrong/.
8 H. Gadamer, translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall, Truth and Method (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation, 1991).
A Truly Great Primary Teacher: Maddie Jacques
Maddie Jacques is a Year 6 teacher at St Bartholomew’s Primary School, Royal Wootton Bassett.
The school leadership’s view
Dan Oakes is a sharp head teacher. He leads St Bartholomew’s Primary School in Royal Wootton Bassett. I met Dan when I was helping his team use Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli’s WalkThrus to improve the effectiveness of teaching at St Bart’s.1 I knew he had some great teachers working there, one of whom is Maddie Jacques, the subject of our conversation this morning. 8
Refreshingly, Dan tells it like it is. ‘There’s a personal cost to Maddie’s greatness. It takes huge time and effort.’ His brow furrows. ‘My job is to nurture her and look after her.’ He tells me her background. Maddie’s Mum was a learning support assistant. Maddie began as a teaching assistant, which was followed by training with Teach First before becoming a teacher. ‘When I interview, I will only shortlist people who can do the job … genuinely do the job. When we interviewed Maddie, I was determined that she wouldn’t leave here without us appointing her! She was absolutely the right person for our school … either that, or she was a compulsive liar!’ We laugh. ‘The final interview was a conversation. She was happy to say that she was “not quite sure” about some answers, and that is usually a sign of a reflective practitioner.’ She is in her fourth year of teaching and such is the faith Dan has in Maddie, she is now teaching Year 6.
I ask him what it was that prompted him to suggest I include her in this book. ‘It’s like what Graham Taylor said about David Beckham, “You look at his passing and he makes it look so simple. When he passes the ball, it always seems to go where he wants it to go. That sounds simple, but believe me, it is not.” What Maddie does in the classroom looks easy, but it certainly isn’t. And the progress that her children make is remarkable.’ There are many factors, according to Dan, that make her the teacher she is becoming. She enjoys reading about what the evidence says might work, and making it work for her in her circumstances. She is very reflective. She is sensitive to what is going on in the room.
Year 6 is a potentially tricky year to teach says Dan, but Maddie has them exactly where she wants them. She has high expectations of the pupils. She focuses upon broadening their word hoard. She is interested in their personal and social education too. She sees the bigger picture of their lives and cares about them deeply. Parents are unfailingly praiseworthy of Maddie’s work.
Finally, Dan tells of how she came in last week despite an ear infection, and how she was demonstrating to colleagues in the staff room how she was using the ‘listening round an imaginary pillar’ technique, 9where you crane your neck forward so that your good ear is turned towards the speaker. The staff room was heaving with giggles, apparently. She cares about the children deeply. She never loses sight of why she came into the profession and how, at the school gate, parents hand over their children to Maddie, entrusting her with their most precious possession for seven hours a day.
It’s time to go and meet Maddie Jacques …
Teaching
As we walk in, Maddie is taking the register. ‘Good morning, Sam.’
‘Good morning, Miss’, Sam replies. This respectful exchange repeats around the room.
The pupils are working on a maths starter. One boy says to Maddie, ‘Me and my dad have been practising maths, Miss.’
‘That’s good. So, if I get some things wrong, you can help me out.’ The boy nods sagely.
I notice the word of the day on the board along with its etymological and linguistic roots: Labour; Laboratory; Laborious; Collaborate; Liberate; Liberty; Liberal. Suddenly Maddie says, ‘Show me 10!’ Every single pupil has both hands in front of them, with their fingers outspread. ‘I’m just waiting for one person.’ Within a nanosecond she has complete attention. ‘Please can my helpers hand out the books.’ With no fuss, four pupils distribute copies of Wonder by R. J. Palacio. On the electronic screen comes up the question: ‘Do we know what he looks like? Give me two features of his face.’ They discuss in pairs and, exactly 30 seconds later Maddie gives a rhythmic clap, which the pupils repeat. Then 100% attention. She takes answers from around the room. Inference is a hard skill to teach. She explores the children’s thinking and why they have said what they have said. It is a disciplined, 10psychologically safe environment devoid of any barriers to learning. There’s full engagement and the energy levels are high. Dan was right when he said she has complete control of the room.
Maddie likes to see as many hands up as possible. Emily’s hand is down. She asks Emily a question. Emily doesn’t respond. She asks again, breaking the question down further. Nothing. She repeats the question. Emily has frozen. The silence verges on the uncomfortable. She reassures Emily and asks someone else, instead. For the next question she asks them to turn to their partners to share their thoughts. They all have partners, of course. No odd pupil out in Maddie’s class. She makes a beeline for Emily, hears her say the right answer, whispers to her, and then when she brings the whole class round, asks Emily for her answer. Emily smiles. She has thawed out completely. Such brilliant teaching. The episode reminded me of Tom Sherrington’s observation that, ‘if you leave pupils out because of your anxiety about their anxiety, you’re no use to them. You’re not carrying them; you are leaving them behind’.2 No one gets left behind in Maddie’s class.
They do some more retrieval work. When they get to a word like ‘duelling’ they repeat it chorally. Every pupil gets their tongue around the word. She has 100% control. There is such a beautiful balance between behavioural control and engagement. Of course, there is such a high level of engagement because the orderly classroom allows everyone to fix upon the learning.
They complete a comprehension task, which they find when they use their iPads to log on to Showbie.3 I have no idea what Showbie is, but delight in watching these 10-year-olds use the technology adroitly. The focus in the room is immense. Finlay exclaims, ‘Miss, I’ve found something out.’ There is an industriousness one rarely sees. I sit in this purpose built, modern room, watching the future, now. This is their 11world. A young teacher, completely on top of her craft, marshalling 28 pupils’ learning using new technology efficiently. When she talks to them, she gives nothing away. She lives with the casual conversations going on around the room, because the pupils are all discussing the work. Her tone with them is insistent but kind.
I notice that some pupils are writing with their fingers on the iPads rather than typing answers. A second later, Maddie notices too. It’s not what she wanted. She admits to the pupils she might have been unclear when she gave the instructions. It is always helpful when the teacher admits their own fallibility.
Her working of the room is expert. Maddie has excellent situational assessment. She has her radar on all the time, building an insight map across the class as to what learning is happening, pupil-by-pupil. When she is speaking to an individual, she does so from a position from where she can continue to scan the room.
Seamlessly, we move onto long division. They begin by reciting the times tables chorally, to well-known tunes:
3s – Row, Row, Row the Boat
4s – Away in a Manager
6s – Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
7s – Bare Necessities
8s – Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
9s – This Little Light of Mine
12s – If You’re Happy and You Know It
It is impressive and they love it! Most importantly, the pupils know their times tables by heart. Maddie spent the last lesson ensuring the building blocks were in place for the pupils to learn the long-division process. She gives them the tools they need to become fluent – multiplication grids last lesson and a heuristic this lesson. 12
She begins with the etymology of Dividend/Divisor, teaching the pupils the Latin-Anglo-Norman French-English historic roots of the word ‘dividend’, a word she asks the pupils to say out loud repeatedly, using robotic arm movements.
She tells them that she wants them to ask themselves two questions: ‘What do you notice?’ and ‘What do you wonder?’ She goes on: ‘Long Division. It’s brand new. I was practising it over the weekend and making some mistakes. You can help me with long division. We are going to practise, practise, practise. We’ll go slowly, one step at a time.’
She begins with 575/23. The pupils all have a x 23 multiplication grid. She uses the visualiser, modelling the long division precisely. She has two big screens for the long/narrow classroom so that everyone can see what she is doing. She moves on to 390/15. The x 15 grid is used. She asks a bit more of the pupils. A textbook ‘I do, we do, you do.’ She gives nothing away. She has a pre-prepared heuristic on the left-hand side on a flip chart, to support everyone, but especially those with additional needs. ‘Give me 10 when you have the answer.’ She then sets the pupils questions to complete without the scaffolding. 351/39, 663/17, 552/23. ‘You’re going to do long division now. I’m excited! I’m going to come round and see what you’re doing and showcase some good work.’ She notices one boy who made an error carrying over and she helps him think it through expertly. She showcases Emily again. She celebrates doing ‘our first one’. To support the subject-specific learning process, the use of the multiplication grids represent a lovely way to show the essential relationship between multiplication and division, and reminds one of the requirement to teach multiplication before division.
The lesson motors along, with pupils just getting on and Maddie coordinating all the moving parts. She is alert to everything. She has the ability to maintain running the room whilst providing targeted support for individual pupils. More showcasing. More examples, with gradated variations. She announces that they should, ‘only put your hands up if you are completely stuck’. She works with the Smarties 13group, a scaffolded intervention for those that she feels need greater support. She is both adaptive and ambitious.
I look around the room. There is a big Star Wars figure on top of the bookshelf. She teaches with the door open. There is a poster, extolling the St Bart’s Way: Be Honest; Aim High; Respect Your environment; Treat everyone well. She suddenly says, ‘Give me 10!’ It’s time for assembly and they are nearly late already. They stand behind chairs silently, but not quite silently enough. Despite the time pressure, she says, ‘Let’s try that again.’ At a moment when it would have been easy not to have insisted on the perfect enactment of a pre-determined instruction, Maddie knows how important it is never to let those standards slip. Maddie shows real discipline.
Off to assembly. I join at the back with Miss Pilsworth, the teaching assistant. I remark on Maddie’s energy. ‘Oh, she’s wonderful! She’s like this every day.’
I come back briefly into the lesson after assembly and the energy levels are undiminished. Grammar terminology is flying round the room with unfailing accuracy. ‘This is how I can use semi-colons to demonstrate the boundaries between independent clauses. Violet played violin; Leo played piano …’ I take half-a-dozen pupils off to the conference room to see what they think of Miss Jacques.
What the pupils think
We don’t have too long. ‘She’s nice. She treats us well. The lessons are fun.’ I ask about the learning. ‘I have a better understanding than last year. She explains things clearly.’
Another one speaks up. ‘I think she’s unique, passionate, friendly and respectful.’ The last word piques my interest. I ask them to tell me more. ‘Well, we get to give our own points of view. I was disagreeing 14with something she thought. She respected my point of view but still disagreed with me and Eloise. It was in geography. We said that the birth rate would go down if there was better health care and medication. Miss thought it would go up. In the end we agreed it might do either.’ It’s an impressive anecdote, in many ways, not the least of which is the precision with which it is recalled and the fact that the pupil feels confident to share it with me.
Indeed, they talk about feeling confident with Miss. ‘She boosts our confidence. Even if what we say is wrong, Miss says things like, “I totally understand where you’re coming from, but if you just think about …” It doesn’t make us feel stupid and we all have a go at things in class now.’ They tell me about how she chooses which people to help, how the Smarties get extra help in maths and the Skittles are more independent. They don’t seem fazed at all by the identification of who needs extra support. I remember our sons sat on tables labelled by different fruits, as though that was going to disguise the fact that the tables were settled by prior attainment. Every pupil knew where they were in the academic pecking order, whilst the teachers tried to pretend there was no such ranking system. Best be transparent and base the allocation of support on equity.
Miss Jacques is fun, but still teaches them what they need to know, apparently! She is OK, as long as they have tried hard. ‘I can go up to her about anything in Year 6. If I was to say I was nervous about my SATs she would help me.’ SATs are on their mind already. That said, Lucy loved being a number in the number charts (I don’t really understand what she means, but I go with it). And they also recall when she played football in high heels and they studied a painting called ‘Jesus on the Tube’. Ordinary words like ‘nice’ are banned – they tell me – and she insists on extending their vocabulary. The Mayans are really interesting. They like having classroom jobs, because they make them feel useful.
According to them, Miss Jacques is: ‘approachable, caring, helpful, unique, passionate, phenomenal, extraordinary’. And having watched Maddie teach, it is impossible to disagree. 15
IRL4: Maddie Jacques
John Tomsett (JT): How did you get into teaching, Maddie?
Maddie Jacques (MJ): I was raised in a household where teaching was a big thing. My mum works in a college and she supports children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). She’d always talked about how rewarding it was, and how you see the impact of all your efforts come to life. I think one of my secondary teachers really changed my view of education. I always struggled in school and she was awesome. She built such a good rapport with me. I remember coming into the classroom. She’d enquire about my weekend, she knew my name, she’d always ask me questions. It was the first time that I ever felt noticed, felt I’d been seen, and because of that, I wanted to make her proud. She inspired me to go to university at Nottingham to study history.
I got my first ever A in that class, ever, in secondary school. She took me aside. I remember it so clearly. She celebrated with me quietly in the corner, stressing how proud of me she was and I just felt so proud of myself in that moment. She’d built up my confidence. I felt I wanted to engage more, put my hand up more, ask questions if I didn’t understand. She changed my view of school because I did really struggle, and I just wanted to be more like her.
When I graduated, I didn’t know what to do with my life. My mum suggested I think about going into education because I’m quite a caring, chatty and enthusiastic person, so I got a job as a teaching assistant in an inner-city school in Nottingham. That was during COVID. I absolutely loved it. During COVID the 16
